Filters

The combination of time occupied engaging theory and editing images has brought these processes closer together in my mind. I’ve began thinking of theoretical tools and paradigms as epistemological filters for overlaying on the available perceptual data. I’ve spent time and resources to acquire Marxian, feminist, post colonial, deconstructive and ecological filters in addition to the Judæo-Christian, liberal, and multicultural ones instilled in my youth. With varying degrees of of intensity I apply each of the filters to find a balance most agreeable. Most filter packs come with a suite, e.g the Marx pack with filters from Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Brown, Harvey, and Gramsci, or the Ecological pack with Haraway, Morton, Deleuze, etc.

These critical filters identify themselves in contrasting relationship to a techno-ideological hegemony with its aesthetics of verisimilitude or Truth. Of course this verisimilitude and it’s critics are drawing in ratios from a similar or shared field of constitutive knowledge. In the parsing and application comes the stylistics we, perhaps misguidedly, attribute the the individual author.

After applying filters in my handheld studio of image production, I often make further edits, adjusting contrast (dialectics?) or depolarizing; removing the most extreme lights and darks. This kind of moderate visual language I’ve noticed increasingly popular in my algorithmically encouraged circles.

I understand both these processes to be navigating balances of content and form and relying heavily on connotative or referential shorthands. At this stage of unevenly distributed visual culture it’s increasingly difficult to delineate between these processes, or rather they are presented in complex bundles.

Social media mention 9/19